The recent mudslide along state route 530 is a devastating reminder that natural disasters are always a potential threat. So the Seattle Office of Emergency Management is hosting an open house to discuss the city's worst potential dangers and the preventative actions the city should take.

The open house opens with "family-friendly activities" (your guess is as good as mine) and refreshments, and the presentation begins at 7. And community members who can't voice their opinion in person can fill out an online survey.

The Northwest Film Forum, the city's Mecca of indie movie programming, is bringing a batch of ultra left-wing films to the screen to celebrate (and speculate) about Seattle's recent shift to the left.

Is it conceivable that Seattle—paradise of plastic bag bans, mandatory paid sick leave, mandatory composting, and civil liberties for backyard goat herding—could actually move any further to the left? Oh yes. In case you missed it, we elected socialist Kshama Sawant to the city council late last year, and we're currently on the cusp of raising the minimum wage, Sawant's campaign pledge.

NWFF wanted to get PubliCola involved, so Josh was asked to program a night for the series. Rather than showing one movie, Josh is going to discuss several movies that each reflect on a different aspect of political urbanism, the brand of politics, that, in his opinion currently offers the most radical and relevant challenge to status quo.

The movies, such as Fight Club and the Blackborad Jungle, touch on themes like urban transportation, mutliculturalism, networks, and youth culture. The finale of his talk features a flick, Hackers, that ties all these urbanist themes together in one exciting, action-packed example of city cinema.

Here's how Josh described the night to the folks at NWFF: It's a tour through movies where urbanism—particularly the electric youth culture of city life—is as radical and subversive as Marxism and Anarchism. Agit-prop teens translate music into politics and tech smarts into transgression, upending the government and corporate status quo, in this collection of urban-themed films. Multiculturalism, mass transit and the kismet of streets (all fixed features of cities) also factor in to the revolution at hand.

Wednesday, April 9 at 7:00PM, Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave.

Advance Notice for April 12

Minimum Wage Town Hall

The Select Committee on Minimum Wage and Income Inequality is hosting a town hall meeting to discuss raising the minimum wage. If you aren't all talked out about this yet, you might want to spend your Saturday speaking to council members and fellow Seattleites about the benefits of raising minimum wage.

You can arrive early (9 am) for coffee and conversation with council members, and at 10 the presentations will begin. Marieka M. Klawitter and Robert D. Plotnick of the UW Evans School of Public Affairs and Ken Jacobs of UC Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment will offer up their analysis of increasing wages.